[I]t is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an ...expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

A learned parson, rusting in his cell at Oxford or Cambridge, will reason admirably well on the nature of man; will profoundly ana...lyse the head, the heart, the reason, the will, the passions, the sentiments, and all those subdivisions of we know not what; and yet, unfortunately, he knows nothing of man.... He views man as he does colours in Sir Isaac Newton's prism, where only the capital ones are seen; but an experienced dyer knows all their various shades and gradations, together with the result of their several mixtures.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

...when I have formed the sounds, said the words out loud, those who had assumed Yiddish was a language of the past only, suddenly... felt it had been revived. As my tongue, mouth, lips, throat, lungs physically pushed Yiddish into the world--as I, a Jew, spoke a Jewish language to other Jews--Yiddish was very much alive. Not unlike a lebn geblibene, a survivor, of an overwhelming catastrophe, it seemed to be saying 'khbin nisht vos ikh bin amol geven. I am not what I once was. Ober 'khbin nisht geshtorbn. Ikh leb. But I did not die. I live.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Neither can I do anything to please critics belonging to the good old school of "projected biography," who examine an author's wor...k, which they do not understand, through the prism of his life, which they do not know.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »